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Barack Obama's Magical Mastery Tour

In 1952, a first-term statewide officeholder from Illinois who was running for president on the Democratic ticket pondered what to do about a seemingly stalemated war halfway around the world. He considered announcing that, if elected, he would go to Korea. Adlai Stevenson ultimately decided against that idea, his advisers later recalled, because it seemed “slightly ridiculous.” But it didn’t seem so ridiculous, on the eve of the election, when Dwight D. Eisenhower himself declared, “I shall go to Korea.”

Voters understood that Ike’s oracular pronouncement really meant, “I shall get out of Korea,” and it doubtless helped him win. I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve watched Barack Obama’s Magical Mastery Tour through the Middle East and Europe. Obama went to Iraq, at least in part, because John McCain dared him to, all but taunting Obama for not having been to the war zone since 2006. McCain should have been more careful what he wished for.

Now Obama is being treated—by the American media and by Iraqi and other foreign leaders—as a virtual president-in-waiting, while McCain cools his heels here at home in the summer doldrums, mired in a mini-controversy over his repeated references to Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. McCain’s complaints that Obama knows nothing about the military, was wrong about the troop surge in Iraq and would put American foreign policy at risk are being completely overwhelmed by Obama’s stop-by-stop, anchor-by-anchor acing of what amounts to a commander-in-chief test.

McCain was right to say that it was at least embarrassing, and probably worse, that Obama had not been to Iraq in so long. Obama might well have gone sooner, if the Democratic primary fight had not dragged on so long. But as it turns out, the timing seems to have worked in Obama’s favor. Now, each time he shakes a foreign leader’s hand, or makes a speech on foreign soil, or looks presidential, he is just that much closer to the election, and to being president.

There are risks, of course. Stevenson decided not to pledge to go to Korea in part because he feared it could seem presumptuous, in the same way that talking about cabinet appointees before Election Day would seem conceited. Obama himself, preparing to speak in Berlin, disarmingly noted the difference between his effort and famous Berlin speeches by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan: “They were presidents; I am a citizen.”

That word comes from the Anglo-French *citezein,*and it refers to an inhabitant of a city, town, or country, especially one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman. And these days, as O Force Onecarries its free man toward Paris and then home, that’s a pretty good thing for any politician to be.